Figurative speech: pointing a poisoned arrow at the heart of semantics

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• 作者：Stephen Barker
• 关键词：Figurative speech ; Semantics ; Truth ; conditions ; Propositions ; Irony ; Embedding ; Speech acts ; Pretence ; Belief ; Belief attributions ; Thought
• 刊名：Philosophical Studies
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：174
• 期：1
• 页码：123-140
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Philosophy, general; Epistemology; Philosophy of Mind; Ethics; Metaphysics; Philosophy of Language;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-0883
• 卷排序：174

文摘

I argue that figurative speech, and irony in particular, presents a deep challenge to the orthodox view about sentence content. The standard view is that sentence contents are, at their core, propositional contents: truth-conditional contents. Moreover, the only component of a sentence’s content that embeds in compound sentences, like belief reports or conditionals, is the propositional content. I argue that a careful analysis of irony shows this view cannot be maintained. Irony is a purely pragmatic form of content that embeds in compound sentences. The standard view cannot account for this fact. I sketch out a speech-act theoretic framework that can. But in accepting this alternative framework we are giving up on the whole idea of an autonomous semantics.